If these are the most manifestations of policy inaction, what are their most prominent drivers? We explore this question and suggest key mechanisms operating at four analytically distinct but in practice overlapping loci of policy-making: individuals; organisations; governments; and networks. We surmise that particular types of mechanisms conduce inaction in each of these realms and that policy inaction is most likely to occur and persevere when these loci and mechanisms overlap and reinforce one another.
Individual-driven inaction
In his constraints model of policy decision-making, Janis (1989) posited that individuals (and groups) employ cognitive, affiliative and self-serving rules, designed to keep in check the inner conflicts they experience, their sense of self-esteem and the relations they maintain with significant others. These rules serve their equanimity in the sense of keeping the stress they experience in their roles of decision makers, at levels they can tolerate. But, as Janis and countless other decision theorists have since demonstrated time and again, these coping behaviours can come at the price of a capacity for reality testing and can indeed immobilise them in the face of mounting warning signals about imminent threats to important values and interests. In earlier work, Janis and Mann (1977) identified several patterns of coping with the pressures of responsibility under which policymakers labour that may conduce them towards inaction:
Unconflicted adherence to the status quo, by selective attention to information about past, present or future conditions and selective interpretation and forgetting of information that conflicts with their benign interpretation of the status quo;
Shifting responsibility (‘buck passing’) for taking a decision or acting on a signal to other people, departments or organisations;
Bolstering decisions already taken in the past by rationalising away the need to reconsider them;
Procrastination, i.e. continued indecision while searching for more information, engaging in further deliberation or determining to defer the making of a decision.
These coping mechanisms make for observable patterns of behaviour that indicate individual policymakers’ propensities for non-acting or for choosing not to change pre-existing policies. For potential answers to the follow-up question of what drives this behaviour—particularly in individuals whose role descriptions and self-conceptions propel them to act as ‘decision makers’ who direct, lead act—we can also turn to Janis. Use of his pioneering work—including his best-known work on ‘groupthink’ (Janis 1982)—in policy studies has since been eclipsed by the predominantly cognitive- and neuroscience-driven ‘behavioural economics’ that is now in vogue. Yet anyone who has ever been close to real-life policymakers and crisis managers realises that it is not just bounded rationality, ‘framing effects’ and cognitive processes that drive policymakers. Their motivational drives, their emotions, their psychological needs and hungers, their self-categorisations and group affiliations have been demonstrated to be at least equally pivotal drivers for them to act—and, importantly here, not act—in the ways that they do (Haslam et al. 2011).
Public organisation-driven inaction
Gathering, receiving, interpreting, creating, communicating and disseminating information is at the heart of the work that public organisations do. How they process information determines how they act—and whether they act. They require information to help inform their direction and operations, as well as to rationalise pathways not taken and issues not addressed (Bach and Wegrich 2019).
While in some senses public organisations may seem to confirm classic Weberian notions of bureaucratic inevitability and dominance, they do not necessarily equate with ideal-type efficiency and effectiveness in information handling (Hood 1998). Variations in public organisations in terms of structures, processes and openness to external environments can lead to variations in ‘sensemaking’ capacity where there is a struggle to rationalise what is ‘out there’ and line up with what is ‘in here’ (Weick 1995: 70). Issues that plausibly could or should be within the frame of public organisations to act upon can linger on the fringes of their attention spans. As Hood (1998), Wilensky (2015) and Bach and Wegrich (2019) argue, each configuration or organisational characteristic brings its own ‘Achilles heel’. Wilensky (2015), for example, famously demonstrated that hierarchy is conducive to concealment and misrepresentation of relevant issues; centralisation can produce out-of-touch and overloaded leaders who do not have enough information, interest or capacity to reliably assess what is relevant, and specialisation cultivates a culture of turf wars and lack of information sharing.
An organisation may also be so focused on particular priorities that it blinds itself to other issues—in effect forgetting how to see, interpret and act upon them (Vetzberger 1998; Stark 2019). A study by Zegart (2007) of the CIA prior to the 9/11 attacks found an organisation unable to acknowledge and act on threats from Al Qaeda because it was still stuck in a Cold War mindset. Hood’s (1998) analysis of the role of cultural archetypes (hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist, fatalist) in governance shows that systems dominated by the latter are likely to display passivity and inertia stemming from a self-negating mindset. In countries such as Pakistan, for example, fatalistic beliefs have proved a formidable barrier to the enhancement of road safety, especially participation in health-promoting and injury prevention behaviours (Kayani et al. 2012).
As with individual policymakers, organisations too can succumb to motivated reasoning—‘seeing what they want to see’—in the furtherance of organisational goals or rationalisation of core beliefs (Weick 1995). The consequence is that a range of plausible and pertinent issues get filtered out that do not aid the furtherance of the leadership’s priority goals. As Bach and Wegrich (2019) argue, it is not possible to scientifically separate blind spots and biases that lead to selective information processing, because ‘bias’ has normative implications of departure from a desired optimum. One implication is that inaction on the part of public organisations is necessary for them to fulfil goals, but judgments on the blurred boundaries between inaction as necessity and inaction as pathology are generally easier to make in hindsight, once there is greater clarity on whether ‘doing’ nothing has been a success or failure.
Government-driven inaction
High aspirations, popular mandates and governments ‘doing stuff’ are embedded in the very fabric of liberal democracies. In practice, however, the actual business of governing necessitates continual, dogged policy inaction, and the eschewing of multiple plausible alternatives (Baumgartner and Jones 2015). Ideologically driven inaction can be the raison d’être for some governments who seek to promote a particular relationship between the state and civil society, where the former secedes as much as possible from continual and active involvement in the lives of citizens (Fried 2007). Policies of abstention (or termination, deregulation, liberalisation) have been at the heart of neoliberal party manifestos and government programmes throughout and beyond the OECD during much of the 1980s–2000s. To a considerable extent its ideological appeal has withstood even the force global financial crisis which according to many observers occurred precisely as a result of the hands-off, minimal regulation stances that governments had adopted as a result of their neoliberal commitments (North 2016).
Importantly, ideologically driven inaction can occur on all shades of the political spectrum. The Liberal prime minister and founding father of the Dutch constitution, Jan-Rudolph Thorbecke, took the principled view that government has no role to play in shaping the arts, and made sure the party and the governments he led came nowhere near doing so, and his successors have maintained this stance and extended it to areas like media policy (Winsemius 1999). Likewise, since 1840 and continuing into the present day, Christian political parties in the Netherlands have successfully fought for and defended what they call ‘freedom of education’—in effect restraining the Dutch state from asserting control over both the organisation and content of education, thus leaving proponents of religious and other worldviews to set up schools that reflect their philosophical commitments (and compel the state to fund them if they meet basic quality standards) (Van Bijsterveld 2010).
In addition to purposeful governmental inaction, the pragmatic demands of governing means that inaction is also a coping mechanism. Governments have limited attention spans and do not have the time or space to provide equal and sustained attention to all issues (Downs 1972) and consequently deprioritising issues is a fact of life (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Baumgartner and Jones 2015). Also, no government or policymaker can ever win all the policy debates they are involved in at any given point in time—and so they slice policy conundrums into manageable bits and pace their attempts to get things done, meaning some aspects get addressed first and others are not acted upon until the stars align.
Furthermore, in a world of immense complexity and uncertainty about how (or whether) issues will escalate and with what support or media attention, ‘doing nothing’ can be the product of governments deciding to wait in the hope that the problem will dissipate or disappear, or more favourable conditions for addressing it will emerge. Doing nothing can be intended to prevent inflaming contentious issues and ride out what they perceive to be fleeting media storms and temporarily inflated public concerns by refusing to ‘overreact’.
Whatever pathway governments forge, and whatever plausible policy alternatives are cast to the margins of agendas, both involve an element of risk (Althaus 2008). Governments routinely deem certain risks and costs acceptable in the pursuit of policies that deliver on ‘core promises’ made during electoral campaigns or otherwise suit the core values and interests of major constituencies. Conversely, they are unwilling to absorb the risks associated with programmes or reforms that address ‘non-core’ promises, eat into their political capital, or cater to less essential constituencies—and thus choose not to act (Vis 2010).
Of course, purposeful and/or pragmatic attempts to control agendas and legitimate inaction in the face of calls to go down plausible, state-centric policy routes, do not always work out as intended. As indicated for example, by analyses of ‘warning signs’ of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, emerging risk in sub-prime markets and a bubble in asset prices, were not acted upon because of a pervasive ideology that market mechanisms had ‘delivered’ economic growth, healthy profits, low inflation (AUTHOR). Hence, inaction on emerging risks was legitimised by an ideology and mindsets that risks were symptomatic of the natural operation of markets, and remediable through market correction.
Habermas (1984) famously identified the disconnect between the experiences and concerns of ordinary citizens in their day-to-day ‘life worlds’ and the institutional logic of perceiving, categorising and appreciating policy problems in the ‘system world’ of governments. Acknowledging the continued existence of poverty, family violence and discrimination in the otherwise successful and ‘progressive’ north-western European welfare states that reside at the top the OECD rankings, requires for instance, that their policymakers actively look beyond the reassuring picture painted by those rankings and the high-level statistics about unemployment and fiscal positions. The contemporary populist revolt in many Western polities rides partly on its critique of the ‘elitism’ of a political and administrative establishment that downgrades, ignores and thus not acts upon the real needs, fears and losses of the common people (Rooduijn 2015). The 2018/2019 ‘yellow jackets protests in France are a case in point, as is at least part of the pro-Brexit movement on the UK, for example among embattled working class voters in the North of England who feel their plight to have been ignored by distant elites as Westminster championing globalisation and the influx of cheap labour it enabled (Hobolt 2016).
Network-driven inaction
From social welfare reforms and urban redesigns, to mega-infrastructure projects and the fight against drug trafficking, working across boundaries has become the norm for almost any significant contemporary policy initiative (O’ Flynn et al. 2014). It is increasingly difficult to find policy problems and a range of viable policy solutions that do not in some ways straddle traditional geographical, institutional, sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries. In response, joined-up government, networked and collaborative governance have become the new aspiration (Head 2014). Much can be achieved by cross-silo working, not least because it can involve the pooling of knowledge, expertise and resources (Carey and Crammond 2015). And yet research suggests that in practice coordination structures, networks and collaborations are complex creatures whose ability to ‘do stuff’ is contingent upon many factors coming together to enable trust and momentum (Ansell and Gash 2008; Emerson and Nabatchi 2015; Laegreid et al. 2014) to occur. It follows that when such fortuitous confluence of preconditions and relations does not occur, such structures of interactive governance may become arenas in which miscommunication, mistrust, interagency politicking and other forms of centrifugal behaviour produce policy stalemates or non-realisation of shared service delivery and co-production ambitions (Klijn and Koppenjan 2016; Bach and Wegrich 2019).
The mere fact that network structures are often designed to overcome collective action problems does not mean they succeed in doing so. Paradoxically, both the design of networks themselves and the behaviour of their participants in networks can actively contribute to their non-delivering on their purpose. When labouring under adverse circumstances or when not managed with a view towards their becoming productive, networks in fact reproduce and succumb to the very coordination problems they were built to address.
